The Nothing Man

by Aiden Ruskin

Each day as I caught the Red Line to school, I walked past a man who wasn't there. His clothes were entirely present- dirty, stained and torn, stiff and verdant; they were an ecosystem in cotton. Each day I noted his outline and I failed to remember his person. Each day he signified a region of the station platform to avoid, but the sight of the man himself evaporated from my mind.

I don't know what made me stop that day. The events are clear: I'd found two dollar bills laying on the snow by my bus-stop and felt like sharing this little piece of luck. But I don't know why I chose a heap of filthy clothing that I walked by every day to be the recipient of that charity.

Maybe it was that you didn't often see homeless guys in the tube.

Normally guys like this stunk of earth and sweat and urine and refuse. Of three-day old beers and regretted mornings shakily endured with a cigarette and more beer. I knew that smell - the homeless were plentiful in the same pockets of urban wilderness where bored teenagers like to congregate.

This guy smelled like nothing at all. Someone that nasty should have reeked; his smell should have added a palpable dimension to his existence like the sight of his clothes, the wheeze of his breathing.

His smell was the same damp cement as the rest of the well-maintained subway platform, and even that was muted by the cold air. I wondered if the stories of sidewalk-millionaires were true, if every evening this guy slouched back to his Mercedes and drove to his McMansion, there to carefully hang up his working outfit, kiss his gorgeous wife, bathe in champagne and eat fois gras off of silver plates, or whatever the really rich did.

Yah right. You had to be stoned or crazy to be lying on the concrete on a freezing morning like this. And he wasn't begging for other people's hard-earned money - there was no cup, no hat, no plaintive sign stating 'anything helps'. But I had my windfall to share, so I nudged the protruding sneaker gently with one of my own. "Hey man, here," I held it out, folded in quarters to hide the meagerness of the denomination. I was having second thoughts - not that I should keep it, but that it was stupid for a kid in a pristine private school uniform to kick a homeless man awake over a measly buck.

A brownish-grey sweatshirt sleeve separated from the pile and raised towards me. Inside the sleeve I could barely make out four finger-tips, more filth than skin with dark brown dirt delineating every whorl and crack and callus. I hesitated for a moment as the sleeve twitched, then gently slid my offering into that grimy tube. Our fingers touched. His were sticky and gritty - authentic in their filth - and mine were smooth and clean. He jerked away, nearly losing the dollar in his recoil. I backed up, then turned and hurried to the platform where the train was pulling in. No words of thanks followed me, and I was glad.

Onto the train I stepped with alacrity, and put off stealing a glance at the heap of humanity until the doors were firmly closed. He had not moved from his corner but his hood followed the progress of the train. I swear eyes that could not be seen watched me.

The remainder of my morning was a letdown. It was just like any other day - I sat in classes that didn't interest me and was ignored by teachers who at this stage in the school year knew who to pick on and who to rely upon, and I fit neither profile. Giving a dollar bill to a weird bum was the most thrilling thing that had happened to me in months, and I told the tale to my friends over the lunch table.

I attempted to ratchet up the drama, but the creepy encounter had been too short. My lack of skill made for a halting narrative, interrupted with 'like's and 'um's as often as it was drowned out by my friends as they yelled greetings to passing classmates and had mini-conversations on the side. In the end I got the story out and knew it to have been heard because Bryan followed up with a much more exciting story of the time a vagrant pulled a knife on his uncle, and Cody countered with how his older brother had once thrown a bottle at two homeless dudes he saw fucking in an alley.